The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. Increasingly, public and private communications networks are being built and expanded using various packet technologies, such as Internet Protocol (IP). Note, nothing described or referenced in this document is admitted as prior art to this application unless explicitly so stated.
In computer networks such as the Internet, packets of data are sent from a source to a destination via a network of links (communication paths such as telephone or optical lines) and nodes (usually routers directing the packet along one or more of a multiple links connected to it) according to one of various routing protocols.
De-activation of a network component (e.g., a link or a node) either by component failure or by planned downtime needs to be managed in order to avoid the risk of packet loss. In known systems, such de-activations cause routing transitions to take place, during which distributed routing algorithms may open up an alternative route. However, such transitions can be relatively very slow (e.g., several seconds) before convergence, and in the interim, data can be lost. Although packet loss is commonly dealt with by higher-level protocols that re-send packets, the inherent delays can adversely affect time critical functions such as voice and pseudo-wire traffic. Desired are new ways to efficiently reroute traffic to avoid failures in a network and to transition back to a desired network configuration once such failures have been fixed.